Resistance, Realignment, and the Roads Not Taken

First, a brief acknowledgment: Kabir remains one of the pillars of this blog. His consistency, depth, and willingness to engage with the hardest questions are invaluable. I don’t always agree with him—but the conversation would be much poorer without his voice. The post is a series of reflections—stitched together from the comment threads.

I. Gaza: Beyond the Pale of Language

The death of a 19-year-old TikToker, Medo Halimy, in South Gaza this week caught my eye—not because it was the most horrific (foetuses are sliced in two in Gaza as Dr. Feroze Sidwa* attests). But because having seen his video, it just made the death so immediate (yes that is a cognitive bias).

At this point, to debate whether what is happening is a genocide feels grotesque. It clearly is. The scale, the intent, the targeting of civilians and children—it’s all there. The legal frame collapses under the moral weight. We are witnessing something darker than war: ethnocultural suffocation & demographic extinction, broadcast live and met with diplomatic shrugs. But the world is watching inspired by the very brave Bob Vylan duo (UK punk-rap duo opposing imperialism, recently denied US visas):

Something stirs and pricks beneath the rubble.

II. The Huma Moment: A Civilizational Reversal?

For over two centuries, the Muslim world has lived under historical gravity—colonized, humiliated, reactive. But in recent years, a new pattern flickers, subtle but persistent.

Azerbaijan (Turko-Israel ally) triumphed over Armenia (Russo-Iranian proxy). Iran reached Israel. The Houthis disrupted maritime supremacy. Saudi Arabia is reconfiguring itself at speed—less Red Sea, more Persian Gulf; less Quraysh, more Aramco. Even the symbolic arc of history seems to bend, if only slightly, in another direction; I’ve touched on Dubai before.

What we may be witnessing is the early edge of what I can only call a Huma moment—after the mythic bird of Persianate lore, whose shadow alone bestows transformation. These are not definitive victories, but they are unmistakable signals. The shadow of the Huma is passing once again over lands that had long forgotten how to dream of ascendancy.

The Kingdom is becoming post-clerical, post-Arabist, post-old order—quietly, almost imperceptibly. Its future may no longer lie in Mecca but in Al-Hasa—less sacred than strategic. And in that shift lies a deeper question: is the Muslim world learning to imagine power not as nostalgia, but as negotiation?

III. Resistance, and What Comes After

Which brings me to the idea of resistance.

It is seductive—morally, emotionally, historically. But what does resistance mean in a world where the line between liberation and vengeance blurs?

Violent resistance feels inevitable in a world this unjust. And yet, Gandhi’s legacy stands like a luminous interruption. India was freed without an army. That was his miracle.

But Gandhi’s contemporaries—Nehru, Q.E.A-Jinnah, Mountbatten—were not equal to the world he tried to leave behind. Partition was not a settlement. It was a wound disguised as withdrawal, a rushed unraveling of a civilizational fabric that perhaps needed a century to mend.

Sometimes I wonder: what if India’s postcolonial moment had been paced, not amputated? Would we be talking today about “resistance” or “reconstruction”?

IV. The Thrones That Never Were

That thought leads me to the Windsors.

European monarchies intermarried for centuries. Queen Victoria’s children found their way onto Catholic and Protestant thrones alike—Belgium, Spain, Romania. But never India. Never Egypt. Never Nigeria.

The British Empire ruled half the world, but never imagined itself marrying into it. No cadet throne in Delhi. No royal marriage to a Maratha or Sikh princess. Not even symbolic absorption.

They married into the Habsburgs, but not the Holkars.

That wasn’t oversight—it was ideology. The Empire saw itself as steward, not partner. It was not about Protestantism**. It was about race. It was about refusing to imagine a shared future.

What if they had tried? What if a United Monarchy of India had emerged—a blend of Victorian and Vedic, with royal marriages across the 600 princely states? Yes, fantasy. But also a reminder that some roads weren’t merely untaken—they were unthinkable.

V. Market Minorities and the Illusion of Disappearance

Every few years, someone laments the disappearance of the Parsis. But let’s be clear: they own South Bombay. Their numbers may dwindle, but their wealth endures and compounds through the property and luxury market.

Market minorities—Jews, Armenians, WASPs, Parsis—don’t vanish. They adapt. They entrench. They survive not by brilliance but by insulation. Their genius isn’t IQ—it’s institutional memory. Like the Norman aristocracy in England (who are still dominant), they endure through rules, not revolutions.

These groups may intermarry, but they rarely dissolve. They find ways to reproduce themselves through structure, not sentiment.

VI. A Misread of Martyrdom

What stunned me about Israel’s strike on Iran wasn’t the force—it was the timing. To bomb just before Muharram, on the threshold of Ashura, was not only provocative. It was a religious own-goal.

Ashura is not a mere mourning ritual. It is the spiritual engine of Iranian Shi’ism—the commemoration of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom, the sacralization of resistance, the sanctification of loss.

When Iran heals itself during Ashura, it does so not only as a state, but as a theater of memory. This isn’t geopolitics. It’s Karbala 2.0. And that matters for the 30% of the population that stick by the Islamic regime***.

Below is a viral video of an older Iranian man berating Trump and calling him “his enemy”:

VII. On Iran’s Civilizational Composition

Western analysts still misread Iran as a brittle state. But Iran’s unusual demographic structure gives it strength. Its non-Persian minorities—Arabs and Azeris—are overwhelmingly Shia. Its Sunni minorities—Kurds and Baloch—are linguistically and culturally Iranic.

This means Iran’s fault lines do not align with neat sectarian binaries. Its coherence is not perfect, but it’s deeper than its critics imagine. Where most postcolonial states battle layered identity fractures, Iran’s fractures are misaligned—and therefore manageable. This man is from Iran’s Arab minority:

It’s a state with real volatility. But also real architecture. And that’s a kind of resilience no Twitter storm can fracture (unlike Elon and Trump who are threatening each other with deportation and deposition).

VIII. The Decay of the English-Speaking Web

Lastly, a word on the intellectual weather. The English-speaking web feels exhausted. The age of wild forums, experimental blogging, and open-source subcultures has yielded to something flatter: brand management and aesthetic compliance.

Where once there was generative chaos, now there are filters. Where there was flame, now there is formatting. Outside of Telegram and a few dissident spaces, the digital agora is fenced. The village square has become a corporate foyer. We don’t post. We perform. The best thinking no longer happens in English or even online. The frontier has moved. Most haven’t noticed.

IX. Seeds for Next Time

Palestine, Partition, Parsihood, Petro-politics. A round-up, a meditation, a loose map of some roads not taken. Thank you again to the commentariat for keeping the fire lit. We may not always agree, but we’re still, in some strange and rare way, thinking together. And in these times, that’s not nothing.

And so we end where we began: not with answers, but with remembrance. Of TikTokers and Tikrit, of thrones that never were and martyrs who never fade. The world is unmaking itself—but thought, at least, remains a kind of resistance.

Footnotes:

* Dr. Feroze Sidwa is a a Pakistani-American Parsi doctor probably related to the author Bapsi Sidwa.

** Many of Victoria’s descendants were Catholic or Orthodox.

*** In a working democracy you need the passive buy-in of the 70%, whereas in a hybrid autocracy you need a very invested 30% backing.